After months of leaks and rumours, Crytek finally revealed the worst kept secret in the gaming industry yesterday. Yes, the original Crysis game is getting a makeover for the current hardware so we can revive the ‘but can your PC run Crysis’ meme again. Called Crysis Remastered, the graphical update for the game will incorporate ‘new technological advancements’ in gaming with software-based raytracing being at the forefront of it all.
Crysis is an old game at this point (almost 13 years old) and while it was ahead of its time, especially in terms of the visual fidelity, it is obviously not comparable to a modern AAA game anymore. However, quite surprisingly, that does not mean that the game isn’t demanding anymore and any PC can run it at max settings. No, the reality is actually quite far from that.
The original game, despite having extremely impressive graphics for its time was actually pretty poorly optimized and a sizably big chunk of the game’s inability to run smoothly on even high end systems stemmed from that.
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In fact, when we tried to run the original 2007 game on a pretty beefy modern gaming rig with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, we barely managed to scrape past the 60 FPS mark at 4K.
So, if the original Crysis narrowly passed 60 FPS at 4K, you can pretty much forget about hitting it on the Remastered version. However, Crytek could potentially iron out a lot of the performance issues with the game and optimize it a little better this time around.
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Thankfully, the developer has also revealed the minimum and recommended specifications required to run Crysis Remastered and honestly, they don’t look too bad; at least on paper. Here, have a look.
Crysis Remastered System Requirements
Minimum:
- Processor: Intel Core i5-6700K or AMD FX-8350 or better
- RAM: 8 GB
- Operating System: Windows 7 SP1
- Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 2GB / AMD Radeon R9 280 or better
- Pixel Shader: 5.0
- Vertex Shader: 5.0
- Dedicated GPU Memory: 2048 MB
Recommended:
- Processor: Intel Core i7-7700K or AMD Ryzen 7 2700 or better
- RAM: 12 GB
- Operating System: Windows 10
- Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB / AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB or better
- Pixel Shader: 5.1
- Vertex Shader: 5.1
- Dedicated GPU Memory: 3072 MB
While the required specifications for Crysis Remastered are still pretty hefty, they’re not as bad as you’d think a 2020 Crysis title would demand. However, the game will still probably end up being more demanding than most other games out right now. Why? Because despite being called Crysis Remastered, there’s a lot more going under the hood than just updated textures and lighting.
Firstly, the Crysis Remastered is going to have some much newer graphical features like volumetric fog and god rays. So, you can expect those exquisitely beautiful forests to look even better with streaks of sunlight piercing through the leaves and diffusing into the fog. The new depth of field will also help with improving the overall visual quality of the game as it can be very efficiently used to hide distant textures that may not be as detailed.
In addition to that, the software ray-tracing will also make a ton of difference since it will accurately emulate things like lighting, reflection and shadows just like they are in real life. However, the ray-tracing that has been the talk of the town lately is hardware based ray-tracing which is handled by separate dedicated cores on NVIDIA graphics cards (and upcoming AMD cards as well).
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It would be interesting to see how these graphics cards handle software-based ray tracing and whether the older graphics cards without the baked-in hardware can handle the computationally heavy workload or not.
Furthermore, with the console port also coming alongside the PC version, the difference between the versions could end up being actually fascinating, especially when you add the inferior hardware of the Nintendo Switch into the mix. Additionally, with the new Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 on the horizon as well, there is also a possibility of a PC equivalent souped-up version of the game for the next-generation consoles too.
In any case though, Crysis Remastered will undoubtedly end up being an absolutely glorious visual feast for our eyes and we can’t wait to get our hands on it. So, can your PC run Crysis Remastered or are you due for an upgrade?
Crysis Remastered is coming out this Summer (2020) on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and the Nintendo Switch.
